The Olympics were a triumph, being knighted was very nice, but now it's back to basic business - and that means getting money from the government. That was the message from Transport for London commissioner Sir Peter Hendy in a speech to an audience of transport and borough professionals last night, in which he stressed and stressed again the vital importance of the government funding a third long-term programme of investment in the capital's transport network. The present deal runs out in two years' time. Submissions for a new one will be made in the coming weeks. If it doesn't happen, the consequences will be "calamitous" Hendy said.

Conjuring a vision of waste and inefficiency borne of the financial uncertainty that characterised the defunct, pre-TfL London transport authority he'd joined 37 years ago, Hendy underlined the implications of London's rapid population growth. "We're building up to a population of nine million by 2020. All of the networks that we manage and that local authorities manage will be under increasing strain," he said. "I predict that when Crossrail opens in 2018 it will be immediately full. The people who predicted that it will take all the traffic out of Oxford Street or that we'll be able to sit down on the Central Line in the rush hour will be wrong. It will just be full up with people."

"In those circumstances," he continued, as Lib Dem transport minister Norman Baker looked on from the dining tables below, "not having an agreed funding programme after 2014/15 is not merely unfortunate, it would be calamitous - calamitous for us, calamitous for suppliers, calamitous for other people in the public sector, and it shouldn't happen. Whatever we've said about cycling funding, whatever we hope to spend on the rest of the sub-surface upgrade, none of it's guaranteed after March 2015. We've got work going on, we've got thousands of jobs dependent on upgrading the underground which will stop if the funding's not there."

Boris Johnson, he said, will be setting out the case to government very soon. "I've told him that I have no intention of letting him leave office [in 2016] without leaving me with a long-term investment package." Mayors come and go. London's transport challenges go on and on.

Footnote: Hendy's speech was made at the Riverbank Plaza Hotel, kicking off the London Transport Awards night of Transport Times. It was a happy occasion for me, as the judging panel had chosen me as its Journalist of the Year. Before presenting me with my very handsome trophy, Janet Cooke, the chief executive of London Travelwatch, said that she and her fellow panelists had been particularly impressed by the Manifesto for a Model Mayor, an "open journalism" project with a strong transport element that I collaborated on with Comment is Free and, of course, many hundreds of Guardian readers. My thanks again to everyone who contributed.